A Collaborative Method for Reuse Potential Assessment in Reengineering-Based Product Line Adoption

Abstract

Software product lines are rarely developed from scratch. Instead the development of a product line by reengineering existing systems is a more common scenario, which relies on the collaboration of diverse stakeholders to lay its foundations. The paper describes a collaborative scoping approach for organizations migrating existing products to a product line. The approach uses established practices from the field of reengineering and architectural recovery and synthesizes them in a collaborative process. The proposed approach employs best practices and tools from the area of collaboration engineering to achieve effective collaboration. The paper presents a case study as initial validation of the proposed approach.

Agile product line planning: A collaborative approach and a case study

“…It is also important to extract features from existing products along with higher-level architectural information. Instead of a domain potential analysis, a reuse potential assessment of legacy assets needs to be conducted to reuse existing experience in a particular domain (Noor et al, 2007b). Legacy assets to be reengineered need to be identified and transformed into reusable components in a core asset base (referred to as reuse infrastructure scoping).…”

Software product line scoping and requirements engineering in a small and medium-sized enterprise: An industrial case study

“…Noor describes two studies (Noor et al, 2006(Noor et al, , 2008, where the collaboration factor is alleviated through the collaboration engineering technique. This improves communication and collaboration between SPL stakeholders during the SPL SC.…”

“…Basically, the use of those patterns would address significant agile principles for the scoping and requirements disciplines such as (i) "Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project" and (iii) "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly" (Noor et al, 2008(Noor et al, , 2006.…”

An agile process model for product derivation in software product line engineering

“…Some suggestions include the Planning Game [3] from the XP methodology can increase agility in SPL organisations, particularly for gathering and negotiating the product requirements. The use of Agile practices during application engineering activities is suggested [2], in particular to perform product tailoring [9] and to support the collaborative working of stakeholders [1].…”

“…We believe that any successful effort to introduce Agile practices in the product derivation process can make SPL significantly more effective and efficient. While some research in the area of Agile SPL has been reported [1][2][3][8][9][10], much of this has been related to identifying the opportunities and challenges. There has been little research conducted on the use of Agile approaches in the product derivation process while no Agile approach for product derivation have been developed.…”